The condition of a few of the provincial licensed houses is still glaringly bad, and shows that old ideas, with respect to insanity, are not entirely obsolete. The Report of the Commissioners of Lunacy for 1856, relates circumstances which lead us back to the old days of Bedlam. Thus at Hanbury House the Commissioners found "one young lady fastened by webbing wristbands to a leathern belt; she was also tied down to her chair by a rope." Again, they found on their last visit to the Sandford Asylum, in December, 1855, "a patient just dead, his body exhibiting sores and extensive sloughs, arising necessarily, we think, from want of water-pillows or other proper precautions. The room has a stone or plaster floor, and is without a fire." It is, however, encouraging to find that, as far as personal restraint goes, the very worst of our private asylums are far superior to some of the best of the public asylums of France. Dr. Webster, our great authority on this point, gives in Dr. Winslow's Psychological Journal, the results gleaned in his visits to these establishments in the August and September of 1850:--
"Forty male lunatics out of 1464 then resident were in _camisole_ (strait-waistcoats), some being also otherwise restrained, thereby giving an individual in restraint to every 33-1/4 male inmates, or three per hundred. Amongst the female lunatics, again, the proportion was somewhat larger, 72 persons of that sex, out of the total 1902 resident patients, being under medical coercion; thus making one female in restraint to every 26-1/3 inmates, or at the rate of 3·78 per cent. In contrast with this report respecting the above-named French provincial asylums, I would now place an official statement of the practice pursued at Bethlehem Hospital during the same period. At this establishment, where formerly the strait-waistcoat, with various kinds of personal coercion, were even in greater use than on the other side of the Channel, _not one_ insane patient, among an average population of 391 lunatics, was under constraint of any description during the five weeks ending the 25th of September, when I first visited that institution after my return from the Continent, and which embraced the whole time referred to in this memorandum."